The term religion" means many different things, and so there are many different ways in which we can say something is religious". Or to put this another way, when the term religion" is used (and it is used a lot, by different types of people in diverse contexts), it is not clear what is actually being meant by the term. A person might think that its meaning is straightforward and simple, that religion is a thing" that is the same for everybody, but such a statement may be understood quite differently by someone else. We must also bear in mind that scholars themselves are responsible for how the term religion" comes to mean certain things. Jonathan z. smith has argued, in a much quoted (and controversial) passage, that religion is solely the creation of the scholar"s study. It is created for the scholar"s analytic purposes by his [or her] imaginative acts of comparison and generalization.